


Blue Lagoon

by blackeyedblonde



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Aquariums, Breeding, Egg Laying, First Meetings, Friends to Lovers, Gen, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, MerMay, MerMay 2020, Mermaid Sex, Merpeople, Non-Human Genitalia, but there's mermaid sex and some violence along the way, this plays out like a cheesy 90s movie with a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:22:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27065584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: The large merman grins almostly wickledy behind his mask. “You can call me Hank, by the way,” he says. “Suppose we’re in this shit show together now, huh?”Connor doesn’t know if he’s ever heard that phrase before and files it away for later. “You have a peculiar way of speaking,” he says, but Hank seems unbothered by it, blinking indifferently. “If you’re imprisoned,” Connor tries again, “where was it they took you from?”“The Big O,” Hank says, obviously trying to be funny even though Connor doesn’t quite know what he means. He doesn’t think this situation is funny at all.“Where’s that?” he asks, and Hank laughs outright in a rush this time.“The ocean,” he says, incredulous. “Where else?”
Relationships: Hank Anderson/Connor
Comments: 63
Kudos: 235





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _CWs: mild breeding kink (brief), egg laying (brief), physical violence, sexual coercion from an outside source, threat of mutilation, Gavin is somewhat likable, Kamski is not a nice guy, Amanda is a better guy, happy stupid Disney Original Movie ending_
> 
> Greetings, comrades. This piece was written back in the spring for the wonderful, AMAZING, beautiful HankCon Mermay zine, “Deep,” which you can find out more about here: https://twitter.com/HankConMerms
> 
> The year has been long, wild, and transformational, and my tenure as a writer in this fandom has been wonderful, but I think this may be the last fully-fledged story I share in the HankCon world for the foreseeable future. For now, seems like I'm all dried up! I’ll divide this fic up into installments and post them accordingly so you can enjoy them in a multi-chapter format if you’d like. Thanks for coming along for the ride, from “eighteen wheels” til now 💖🧜♂️

  
  
The North Atlantic rolls and churns beneath the building storm, the winds screaming and howling like harbingers of certain death as the sea tries to swallow them whole. Chloe clings to the railing from her vantage point by the bridge, blonde hair plastered to her cheeks and throat while she watches the scene unfold on the deck below.

They’d been tracking the merman for days. He’d been elusive at first, and faster than his hefty stature would’ve otherwise foretold, but he’d evaded capture until he had to come up for air in the midst of the storm and they blinded him with the floodlights. He’d only been disoriented for a moment, but that moment was all the crew had needed to net him.

On past excursions, the other merpeople had given in or died long before now. They are particularly fragile, Chloe supposes, for wild creatures that live in the great maw of the ocean. Like great whites, in the sense that they often die in captivity before they can breed or be studied with any longevity, giving in to bizarre organ failure or succumbing to the first foreign pathogen passed on from some unwitting human slip-up. 

So far, they’ve had half a dozen go belly-up like carnival goldfishes before they could even get back into port with the poor things. But as Chloe watches on, her gut tells her this one won’t go so easily. 

The old ship lurches in the storm, rocking so far on the starboard side that it groans like a dying beast, and the motorized arm on the winch snaps and fails. The net and the hundreds of pounds of merman in it fall to the deck, unravel, and from there the carnage begins. 

One crew member is already bleeding out on the planking, throat torn into like it was nothing more than crepe paper. He’s gurgling as scarlet foam bubbles up from between his lips, drowning in the freezing rain. Chloe knows he’ll die whether she runs down to help him or not.

“Shoot it!” the ship’s captain screams, shoving a man aside to throw all his weight into securing one of the net weights as rain comes down on them in sheets. “Pull it the fuck up and _shoot it!_ ” 

“Don’t kill him!” Dr. Kamksi is shouting, over and over and over, even while pandemonium is erupting around him from heaven and hell and everywhere in between. “This is my life’s work and we’re taking him in alive, do you hear me? I want him alive!” 

The merman is still halfway tangled in the net, roaring some guttural language none of them knows how to speak, and lashes out to grab the ankle of one of the crewmen. The man falls and crumples like a rag doll as his bones break, only half a second too little too late, and then slips from the merman’s stunned grasp as it takes seven full-grown sailors to hoist the great sea creature back up into the air. His body hits the deck with a thud the same moment the merman begins to go sluggish and limp, slowly struggling until he’s nothing but dead weight swinging there on the broken winch while the sea screams for vengeance. 

Chloe lowers her sights from the dart gun and blinks some of the rainwater from her eyes. It’d taken three tranquilizers before he even showed signs of slowing down—two more than any of their other captures have ever needed to be sedated. 

Dr. Kamski turns, as if on a mechanical pivot, and looks right at her through the storm pounding the deck of the ship. Bloody water streams under his boots from the dead crewman lying a few feet away but he’s smiling, face split into a maniacal, crazed grin as they finally lower the net back onto the planking and the captured merman slumps over in a drugged heap.

“This is him,” Kamski calls up to Chloe while the others begin securing the creature and readying it for transport below deck. His voice somehow carries above the din of the rain, clear and eerie through the ocean’s howl. “This is the one we’ve been waiting for.” 

Chloe nods, shoulders the dart rifle, and briskly walks back over to the control room on the bridge. Water drips off her in rivulets and pools on the tile beneath her boots. The captain is still down on deck but the helmsman at the wheel stares at her with wide, unblinking eyes. 

“The expedition has come to a conclusion,” Chloe says simply, smiling sweetly. “Feel free to turn us around and make way for port.” 

* * *

It’d been a stroke of pure fucking luck that Gavin landed this shitty job at all.

True, he’s not any stranger to doing work that gets his hands dirty. Three years running illegal chop part shops and a residual year in the slammer had proven as much, on top of the two months he’d killed and boiled crabs in Maine before he’d thrown the towel in on smelling like goddamn fish guts for the rest of his life. 

There weren’t a lot of first-rate options for guys fresh out of the state pen unless you wanted to cut grass in the burbs or man the grill at a truck stop, but there _was_ an ad in the paper for janitorial detail at a warehouse down by the Detroit marina. Place seemed sketchy as fuck at first, what with all the high tech security and shit—the ad had merely said they dealt with _innovative aquatic research and marine biology_ , and so long as whacking crabs wasn’t involved, Gavin figured he could mop a few floors and scrub a few fucking tanks to make rent. 

After his background check had come back, the blonde lady fielding his application handed over a badge and the keys to the custodial closet. She eyeballed him somewhat boredly, and then said, “This institution doesn’t work for the state or federal government. It’s entirely privately funded and operated from the inside out, so as an employee you’re beholden to at-will suspension and termination for any violation as we see fit.”

When Gavin nodded, the woman leaned forward across her desk, just an inch. “Because of your…ah, more colorful background, Mr. Reed, I presume you may already know how these sorts of internal affairs are handled, depending on the severity of the infraction.”

Gavin could feel the cold sweat running down his back despite the coolness of the woman’s office. The entire wall behind her desk was the face of a huge glass aquarium holding a massive jellyfish with streamer-like tentacles, floating listlessly in the water as it drifted to and fro. He watched it as he nodded, and then made himself meet her icy eyes.

“What, are you guys gonna feed me to the fishes if I slip up?” he tried to joke, giving her a trademark smile. 

She didn’t quite smile, but the corner of her mouth had twitched. “Something like that.” 

He’d agreed to start right away, and now that he’s in his boiler jumpsuit with a mop and bucket trailing behind him, the gig seems a little more legitimate. The custodial closet hadn’t been filled with body bags and dynamite, just the typical run-of-the-mill maintenance shit, including a schedule of what needs to be cleaned on which day: offices, bathrooms, kitchens, delivery bays, the visiting researchers’ dormitories. 

Today, however, is a little different. It’s the first time in his two weeks of employment Gavin’s been asked to clean the viewing room in the far west grotto, which oddly needs three badge swipes and clearance with security before he can so much as spitshine the floor. When he finally wheels his cleaning cart into the cool stone room, he’s expecting to see Jaws incarnate or a mother fucking cthulu—but there’s nothing but a luxurious theater setup overlooking an empty tank. 

It’s a weird disappointment, because maybe his heart had been pounding in anticipation of… _something_. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because in his two weeks here Gavin’s seen plenty of big and fugly-ass sea creatures, but nothing you couldn’t easily find on the Discovery Channel with that Attenborough guy narrating. 

Gavin is bent over, wringing out his mop in a yellow squeegee bucket when he feels overcome with the sudden knowledge that he’s being watched by something a whole lot closer than any of the monitor jockeys in the surveillance room.

When he turns around, slowly, the hair on his arms is already standing on end. The hand tucked into his right pocket already has one of his maintenance screwdrivers in a white-knuckled grip like a prison shiv out of forced habit. He somehow knows it wouldn’t do much good. 

But the two brown eyes gazing back at him through the viewing window aren’t hostile—only curious. A human-like hand with translucent webbing between the fingers comes up in a silent wave as the thing bobs there in the tank beyond, gills flaring as it gently pulls water in through the odds slits on its neck. Its chest and arms look mostly male and human, save for the scattered throw of scales low on its pelvis that glimmer like opalescent jewels. 

And everything below that— _well._ Gavin hears a distant thud as the wooden mop handle in his hand falls and hits the grotto floor with a smack. He blinks, and the fish man is still there, with six or seven feet of fish tail and gauzy fins fluttering there in the water. Blue as blue can be, the color of rich topaz.

“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” a woman’s voice says from somewhere behind him, and Gavin whips around so fast he almost slips on the damp floor he just mopped. “Our first and only hatchling to reach adulthood.” 

“He?” Gavin blurts out, looking into the woman’s mature, dark features and then back at the fish person floating just a few feet away. “What? _That?_ That’s a goddamn—”

“Merperson, yes,” the woman says mildly. She watches Gavin from behind a slim pair of rimless glasses, braids wound up in an intricate knot on top of her head. “His name is Connor. I’m surprised you haven’t seen him until now.”

Behind them, Connor swims in a graceful loop and hangs suspended upside-down in the water, hair waving like the tendrils of an anemone. He smiles, an uncanny expression that shows off sharp canine teeth, and then slips from view as he disappears among the rocks and corals in the expansive tank made to mimic the ocean floor. 

Gavin stares, and stares, until at last the last wisp of a fin is gone from view. “I,” he starts to say, and then shakes his head, looking at the dropped mop still on the floor. “Holy fucking shit.”

“I’m Dr. Stern, by the way,” the woman says, extending a slim hand. “Amanda Stern. Lead research advisor.” 

“That was real?” Gavin asks, sniffing after he shakily pumps Dr. Stern’s hand up and down. He peers up, at the ground, and all around looking for cameras or a hidden crew, even Ashton Kutcher ready to jump out and side tackle him. “This isn’t some kind of sick joke, is it? That you play on the new guy.” 

Dr. Stern chuckles, smiling faintly. “You can believe that, if you’d like to,” she says. “Whatever puts your time here to its most efficient and well-meaning use. Though, I would advise against spreading around any…misinformation, outside the institute here. Connor is our best-kept secret for a reason.” 

Gavin nods, maybe too quickly, but then tries to cover it up with the first question that comes to his spinning mind. “Does it—uh, fuck. I mean, does he have any friends? Or maybe you guys just keep one freaky fish person around at a time for tax purposes, I dunno.” 

Dr. Stern walks closer to the viewing window, overlooking the tropical fish swimming in small schools as they pass by. The line of her shoulders has stiffened somewhat, and she folds her hands behind her back as she speaks. 

“Interesting you should mention that,” she says, gazing unblinkingly into the cool blue water. “I believe our brand new specimen is being cleared from quarantine and introduced into Connor’s tank tonight.” 

* * *

Several days ago, the divers came and installed a transparent wall at the far side of his habitat. Connor was lured away and kept contained in the grotto cave while they worked for several long hours in teams, but he could clearly see through the bars that a part of the tank was being corralled off. Later, when he was free to swim as he pleased, he pressed his hands against the clear acrylic and touched the pads of his fingertips to the small holes, no bigger than his pinky, drilled into the surface to allow the water to flow through. 

“What is it for?” he’d asked Chloe when she was routinely drawing his blood later that afternoon, watching the bluish-purple liquid run into a vial through the butterfly needle in his tail. “The wall.”

Chloe kept her eyes lowered, absently pressing the scaly flesh around the draw site. “Dr. Kamski has a new research initiative we’re beginning to explore,” she said, in the soft way that usually meant she wasn’t going to elaborate much more. When she pulled the needle from Connor’s body with one gloved hand, the other hand immediately pressed a cotton ball soaked in iodine to the tiny puncture with care. “I believe he should be introducing you to the concept soon enough.” 

For two days the other side of the see-through wall remains empty, save for few rock formations and corals and the odd sea star or two that have been caught in the divide. Somebody stocks the water with feeder fish that aren’t bright enough to keep from swimming headlong into the thick acrylic before they eventually learn there’s an unseen barrier in this strange new world. Connor’s curiosity about it all begins to burn so brightly that it turns itself into a hollow, aching feeling deep in the pit of his stomach. 

The visit Dr. Kamski pays him one evening doesn’t provide much relief. 

“Hello, Connor,” the doctor says, smiling where he sits on a sunbathing rock at the edge of the above-water lagoon. “How are you feeling? We’ve noticed you haven’t been hunting or eating as much as usual, lately.” 

Connor looks beyond Dr. Kamski, at the greenery and tropical trees surrounding the lagoon and the bars behind them. He’s never been outside this enclosure, at least not any time he can remember. Sometimes he sees birds flying overhead, but none are ever allowed to come into the lagoon. It’s been explained, time and again, that birds carry too many diseases. 

“I’m...curious, about the dividing wall in the tank,” Connor says simply, flicking the end of his tail in agitation so it lightly slaps in the water. “It’s been on my mind a lot. Chloe told me there’s a new research undertaking.” 

“Oh yes, I figured she must’ve mentioned something to you in passing,” Dr. Kamski says dryly, folding his hands in his lap. He studies Connor behind his glasses, ponytail ruffling some in the gentle breeze moving through the lagoon. “It’s a bit of a complicated process, Connor, and I don’t want to overwhelm you all at once. I think we may need some time to introduce you to the concept. It all depends, of course, on how you and your new tank mate get along.” 

That makes Connor’s heart clench and thunder in his chest, head swimming with the dizziness of disbelief and hope all at the same time. “What do you mean?” he asks. “I thought I was—? You told me I was one of a kind. There aren’t any more Connors.”

Dr. Kamski smiles pleasantly, nodding with a movement of his head tipped off to one side. “That much is true,” he says. “There aren’t any other Connors, yet. But maybe there could be.”

_Yet._

Connor stares at him, and Dr. Kamski gazes back. His brows raise a hair, and then he says, “I know you’ve been quite lonely here at times. Despite the level of care and enrichment we’ve continued to provide throughout your life, it doesn’t act as much of a replacement for the companionship of another merperson. It’s taken us an exceptionally long time to track down an appropriate suitor, Connor, you understand. This wasn’t a decision made lightly.”

A surge of chemicals and feeling floods through Connor’s body all at once. He flushes periwinkle with agitation and excitement as some of the fins along his back prickle with spines that have been clipped short like a captive stingray’s barb. “Who is it?” he asks, tail vibrating in the water. “When will they get here?”

An intercom sounds from somewhere outside the lagoon, just a single chime of three distinct notes, but Dr. Kamski holds up his hand like he’s waving whoever’s watching off.

“He is quite unlike you in a myriad of ways, but then again I think that we may all benefit from your...physical and cultural differences, as it were.” Kamski clears his throat, briefly, and then smiles again before rising to his feet in the soft sand. “That’s really all I’m at liberty to say for the moment, considering you’ll be meeting him yourself soon enough. We’re only keeping you separated for a brief trial to prevent any unwanted physical altercations.”

Connor has a thousand different questions he needs the answers to, succumbing to a peculiar feeling of delighted dread that he’s never experienced before. It makes him feel like he’s turning inside out in his own scales and skin. He’s never met another merperson in his entire memory and the possibility seemed outlandish, if not completely impossible, up until this very moment. 

The fact that he’s been told something other than the truth doesn’t even fully register in his mind, at least not yet. The shock of meeting another of his own kind eclipses everything else like the moon’s shadow cast over a single glass marble. 

A buzzer sounds and the electrified gate at the end of the lagoon begins sliding open. Kamski shuffles through the sand on bare feet, in his khakis and untucked button-down like a businessman who decided to take a stroll along the beach after work.

“Why him?” Connor manages to blurt out before he can go. The aching want for a pair of legs to run after the doctor has never been so great. “Why now?” 

“We’ll tackle those questions as we go, Connor,” Dr. Kamski says as he steps beyond the barrier into the strange concrete world beyond Connor’s lagoon. “Don’t be concerned with it. All you need to worry about in the meantime is making our new addition feel welcome.”

The buzzer sounds again, and then, after the doctor casually steps through, it closes again until the outside world is out of sight.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Darkness has just begun to fall when the scent of fresh blood hitting saltwater buzzes in Connor’s olfactory glands. 

There had been a commotion prior to that, one which he’d been strategically dissuaded, once again, from investigating. Pressed against the grotto’s barred entry point, he watches a cloud of dark red bloom in the water like an opening night flower. People are screaming, faintly from this distance, though it’s difficult to discern the words when he’s this far under the surface. 

When the shape of something large and struggling drops into the tank and begins moving rapidly through the water Connor’s heart beats hard in his chest, pounding enough that he can press a hand over it and feel the frantic movement. Whatever—or whoever—it is swims headlong straight toward him, only to hold up a forearm at the last second as it bounces roughly off the acrylic wall. 

Suddenly, Connor can hear a voice, shouting in short, guttural bursts of a language he can’t process or understand. It rings clear as a bell through the water, though, as if the words had been spoken above them in the open air by a deep voice, roughened and undeniably angry. 

There’s the short _fwip_ of a high-power projectile through water, and then Connor watches as the other merman slowly stills until he sinks like a stone to the bottom of the tank. He stays there for a few long minutes until two divers reappear again, one holding a spear and the other with something Connor can’t make out. They fasten something around the merman’s face and then, taking him beneath the underarms, lift him in tandem back to the surface of the water.

It seems to take hours, but eventually the gate on the grotto is withdrawn and Connor is able to swim out into the bright moonlight rippling across the lagoon. He moves swiftly to the other side of the tank where the transparent wall separates him from the newcomer, but even after tracing the perimeter a half-dozen times he sees no sign of the other merperson. 

On his last trip around the wall, Connor pauses long enough to look at something odd pressed against the clear acrylic, being nibbled on curiously by feeder fish. Two human fingertips lay forgotten on the sandy bottom, neatly severed up to the second knuckle by something, or someone, with unmistakably sharp teeth.  
  


* * *

  
  


Dawn breaks like a cask of rosy wine on the coast, bittersweet and wet on the tongue. Connor surfaces in the lagoon at first light and looks for any new signs of life or disturbance but can’t find any. When he tries to swim to the opposite shore, he finds that it, too, was corralled off to keep the occupants of the tank separated. 

He’s staring at the rocks in the far corner of the makeshift beach when a splash sounds from his right, but by the time he whips around to look whatever was there has already disappeared as if it was never present at all.

It’s an uncanny sort of feeling, being slower or more cumbersome than another living creature in close proximity for once. Connor can swim a hundred yards with the swiftness of a bottlenose dolphin and jump as high as a spinner shark from the water, according to the statistics he’s generated through the years. His pulse still quickens with a mixture of fear and trepidation as he silently slips under the water, only to come face to face with the merman he’s been seeking all along.

He shouts something wordless in fright, sending a stream of bubbles toward the surface. The merman on the other side of the clear divide is huge, hulking and broad and unlike anything Connor ever could’ve imagined. His big barrel chest is scarred and coarse with silvery hair the same color as the halo of waves around his head and the trail low on his belly. Unlike Connor’s lower half, he doesn’t have shimmering fins and azure scales, more tawny and bronze like something meant to blend in, other than the faint darts of gold along his fluke.

He has facial hair around his mouth and jaw, but it’s been mostly obscured by the muzzle cage strapped and locked around his head. 

The merman says something, yet again, in that guttural language Connor doesn’t understand. He sounds urgent but not frantic, pressing both broad palms to the clear divide between them. The gill flaps on his neck open and close as he speaks, filtering out water in a rush. 

Connor can’t find the words to utter any answer. He stares, wide-eyed, choked, and doesn’t know what to do. The merman staring back at him quits vocalizing for a moment, gone still and suddenly quiet. He watches Connor with pale blue eyes that seem shrewd but a multitude of other things beneath that, too, that Connor couldn’t begin to decipher. 

When the merman turns, slowly, he shows off a wide expanse of scarred back but also the locked mechanism keeping the muzzle on his face. He points to it, making sure Connor sees the place where a key is meant to be inserted, and then turns back around with a rush of water through his gills that sounds remarkably like a sigh. 

_He wants it off_ , Connor thinks. He knows he would, too, if he’d been forcibly put in a mouth cage, but isn’t sure what he can do about it. He nods nevertheless, mutely but eagerly, and carefully backs away. The other merman’s eyes narrow but he doesn’t say anything else, gazing on, unbothered as Connor slips away and swims back to the other side of the lagoon.

As soon as Connor is tucked in the relative safety of his grotto, he sags in physical relief despite the thrumming of his heart. At the same time, now that the other merman is out of sight, he wants nothing more than to go back and look at him again. He wants to study him, to pick out all the differences—big and small—between their faces and fins and bodies. More than that, he wants to _touch_ him. To feel another merperson for the first time in his life, to know he’s solid and real, that his scales have the same pearl-slick glide as Connor’s do. 

As the morning wears on the aquarium slowly begins to come to life. The staff and workers start moving to and fro on their assigned duties, some of them visible through the viewing windows that Connor passes on his routine hunt for breakfast. He’s just only caught a squid and torn into it with his teeth when he looks up and sees the same human from the other day, the one who’d dropped the mop and stared, dope-faced, with his nose practically pressed to the glass. 

Connor chews the wriggling tentacle sticking out of his mouth and then offers a slight smile in return. He doesn’t know this human but he’s somewhat handsome in the face, if only in a scruffy and roguish kind of way. A gold chain is visible at the opening of his worker’s jumpsuit below his throat, and then, letting his eyes wander to the next shiny thing visible, Connor spots a key ring hanging on the man’s belt loop.

He thinks of the silver color of the buckle clasped at the back of the merman’s head, trying to match it with one of the keys on the human’s belt. A dozen different keys, but no matches.

 _Hey_ , the human on the other side of the glass mouths, thumping on the glass with his knuckles. _Eyes up here, you fuckin’ weirdo._

Connor smiles innocently and takes another big bite of squid, which makes the man step back and make a wretched face. He turns away to start up his vacuum cleaner again, though he keeps turning to peer at Connor over his shoulder to steal strange and wary glances until, at last, he turns around and finds the merperson gone.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“I hear you had a brief introduction to our newest addition,” Dr. Kamski says later that afternoon, sipping at a glass bottle full of some organic drink while he peers at Connor lounging in the shallows of the lagoon. “Were you able to communicate with him at all, Connor?” 

“No,” Connor says, truthfully. He doesn’t mention the merman’s bid to help him unlock the muzzle. “I don’t think we speak the same language.” He tries to think of something to distract Kamski or lead him off onto a tangent so the subject won’t arise any further. “He is very large. Bigger than I imagined.” 

A crease draws between Kamski’s eyebrows as he slowly screws the lid back on his drink. “Oh, really? What were you anticipating?” 

“I don’t know,” Connor says, thinking of the corded muscle in the other merman’s thick arms and then the deep scar wedged into his belly like a crescent, which makes the skin on Connor’s own stomach tighten and tingle in an odd way when he reimagines it. “I suppose I thought he’d be more like me. But I’m glad he isn’t.” 

“All merpeople aren’t the same, you know,” Dr. Kamski says sagely. And then, more carefully, “That’s a big part of the reason we brought him here. We thought you might enjoy seeing another of your kind with his…impressive stature.” 

Connor mulls that over, trying to make sense of things. “Why does it matter what _I_ would want or enjoy?” he says, eyes flicking over to Kamski as his tailfin makes tiny ripples in the water. “I thought you brought him here for more research purposes.” 

“We did,” Dr. Kamski answers. 

He goes quiet for a few moments, idly sloshing the remainder of his drink around the glass bottle, back and forth like an hourglass full of liquid time. After a moment he opens his mouth, closes it, and then opens it again. 

“Do you ever have desires, Connor?” he asks. “Deep, profound things you want or yearn for whenever you’re alone?” 

Connor has longed with his entire being to see an ocean he can’t fathom but feels called by anyway since the moment he broke out of his egg many years ago. Sometimes he can hear it, and taste it, if he only closes his eyes and thinks hard enough. But he knows he’ll never see it. 

“I—I don’t think I understand,” he says, feeling gently flustered in a way he can’t explain. “What kind of desires? We all have things we need and want whether we’re mer or human. Chloe told me that, once.” 

“This isn’t necessarily about our basic requirements for food and shelter,” Kamski says, eyes hewn sharp and inquisitive behind his glasses now. “More along the lines of physical comfort and...stimulation, if you will. Of wanting to be in another’s company, yes, but as closely as possible. An intimate and romantic encounter where you might’ve not had one before.”

Connor immediately thinks of the seasonal episodes he’s had in recent years, his body alight with some invisible fire that runs through him like an insatiable current. It never lasts long, if only because Chloe or another one of his caretakers bring him a series of painless injections that make the feeling of itching emptiness shrivel up and go away. But before it dissipates, Connor knows quite well the unspoken need to sequester himself away in the grotto and burn through some of the wanting that can only be satisfied by his fingers in places that always ache for something more.

“You want me to copulate…?” he asks abruptly, even if the idea makes heat bloom through his face and chest. “With _him?_ ” 

Kamski laughs lightly, squeezing one of his knees where his legs are crossed. “Don’t get too far ahead of me, 800,” he says, using Connor’s designated tag number for the first time in a while. It sounds strange and clinical to Connor’s ears. “Right now we’re focused on making sure you two can get along without him causing any trouble, hm? We’ll have to wait and see if you two can even be friends.” 

Dr. Kamski stands and once again heads for the gate at the side of the enclosure, signaling that their conversation is done for now. 

“I’d like to be,” Connor says after him, the words coming out unbidden. “Friends. With him, I mean.” 

“Good,” Kamski says over his shoulder, giving Connor a comforting sort of smile when he pauses and turns outside the security point. “That’s exactly what I like to hear.”  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

  
  
As twilight approaches Connor bypasses his evening hunt and instead wanders back over to the far side of the lagoon. He’s been avoiding it since this morning, wherein the hours between then  and now feel more like weeks with how they’ve dragged on. He wonders, briefly, if he ever saw the other merman at all. The encounter certainly feels like something out of a strange, intangible dream.

Connor makes one full lap around the perimeter of the acrylic enclosure before he spots movement in the other small underwater grotto. It’s modest in size, and probably nowhere near comfortable for a merman of the newcomer’s size, but it provides at least modest shelter to rest and sleep in. There’s the flourish of a tailfin and then a head poking out to look at him, slightly groggy but already alert. 

This time, Connor doesn’t fidget or flee. He curls his tail beneath him and sits there on the sandy bottom, letting all the retained oxygen in his lungs drift in glassy bubbles toward the surface. He waits, and waits some more. He wants the other merman to come to him.

And eventually, he does. It’s nearing dark when the larger mer finally swims the distance between them, seeming even larger than he had earlier in the day once he settles on the opposite side of the clear wall. He doesn’t move outside the rippling shine of his silver hair, which seems to come to life in the faint moonlight. 

Connor makes note of some new details he hadn’t noticed before, even as he feels himself being sized up in kind. That blue-eyed gaze isn’t cold, per se, but it’s certainly heavy. Connor thinks he can almost feel the merman’s eyes slide over him with the weight of a physical touch, and the idea strangely wicks some of the moisture from his mouth even when it’s full of water. 

“I wish you understood me,” he says futilely, quietly, in English. It’s hard to enunciate some of the words beneath water and the humans have certainly never been able to hear it with their naked ears, but the merman’s eyes immediately widen, mouth parting open behind the cage on his muzzle. 

“Holy shit,” he sputters out before his gills fully flatten, making Connor’s head snap up. “I thought you were mute.” 

“N-no, I’m not,” Connor answers, sitting up to press himself against the barrier as his heart beats high in his throat. His mind races with unanswered questions and they all come spilling out, difficult to stop or filter. “What’s your name? Why are you here? Where did you come from? Why did you bite that man’s fingers o—?”

“Whoa, easy now,” the other merman says, holding his palms up with a soft laugh that takes Connor by surprise, given the circumstances. He has a barb behind a diaphanous fin on the side of each wrist, concealed somewhat by a smattering of bronze scales, but the staff had already taken care to snip off the sharp end. “One question at a time, kid. And considering I’m the imprisoned fuckin’ guest on your turf, I think  _ I _ should be the one grilling you.” 

Connor gapes, stunned. He forgets to breathe for a long moment, and then makes a strangled sound before the water rushes through his gills all at once. “My name is Connor,” he says shakily. “I’ve lived here my whole life.” 

“That’s a damn shame...explains a few things, though,” the other merman says, sounding pained and tired. He moves forward and presses his strong nose to one of the holes drilled in the dividing wall, catching and tasting a whiff of Connor’s scent on the water. “There’s nothing wild about you.” 

Connor doesn’t know if that was meant to be an insult or a lament, but he doesn’t have much time to think it over before the large merman grins, almostly wickledy, behind his mask. “You can call me Hank, by the way,” he says. “Suppose we’re in this shit show together now, huh?” 

_ Shit show. _ Connor doesn’t know if he’s ever heard that phrase before and files it away for later. “You have a peculiar way of speaking,” he says, but Hank seems unbothered by it, blinking indifferently. “If you’re imprisoned,” Connor tries again, “where was it they took you from?”

“The Big O,” Hank says, obviously trying to be funny even though Connor doesn’t quite know what he means. He doesn’t think this situation is funny at all.

“Where’s that?” he asks, and Hank laughs outright in a rush this time.

“The ocean,” he says, incredulous. “Where else?” After a moment his expression turns strained and grim again, and he ducks his head. “We’re worse off than I thought. Listen, I—I didn’t mean to rub anything in. I’m still halfway in crisis mode and I don’t know what to do with myself in this fucking place.” 

Connor settles back down on the sand, fingers gone to idly play with tiny pebbles in the sand. “No offense taken,” he says, eyes cast low. “I’ve never seen the ocean, but it’s not so bad here. They’ve always taken good care of me.”

“This is  _ nothing _ ,” Hank says immediately, and the echo of yearning and passion in his voice keeps some of Connor’s irritation at bay. “This entire place is one drop of water in an endless stretch of water bigger than you could ever attempt to wrap your head around. I’ve been in the drink for half a century and I’ve still only traveled a fraction of it.”

Hank sighs, turning away to look through the dark water. 

“Figured I’d die before I saw a quarter of it, and I guess I was right. Here I fucking am. Surprised they haven’t killed me yet.”

“You’re an asset,” Connor says simply, blinking when Hank looks up at him with his features narrowed in suspicion. “You’ve been selected to forward a research agenda. Everything here has.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Hank growls. “How do you know that?”

Connor realizes he may have spoken too soon, but there’s no taking it back now. He feels oddly conflicted between wanting to keep his conversation with Dr. Kamski confidential, and then sharing everything he knows with this other merman he’s only just become acquainted with.

“The—the scientists are fascinated by your size and stamina,” Connor murmurs, not quite meeting Hank’s eyes when he says it. “You’re very different from me, so I’m sure they want to study you uniquely. Your strength and temperament is probably endlessly fascinating to them.” 

Hank swears something awful under his breath and scoffs. “Well fuck their fucking fascination,” he says. “They took me from my home like some dim-witted common animal, so if they think they’re going to hook me up like a willing lab rat, they’ve got another thing coming.”

Connor thinks back to the blood in the water and studies the metallic bars covering the lower half of Hank’s face. He has no doubt about what feats of strength and power Hank might be capable of if he gets a notion in his head about them.

“You bit that man’s fingers off,” he says mildly, but he somehow can’t stop the wavering smile that tugs on the corner of his mouth when he looks at the boldly challenging look on Hank’s face. 

“And I’ll raise a lot more fucking hell, too, by the time we’re done here, kid,” Hank says, nostrils flaring. “You can mark my words on that.”

Connor doesn’t disbelieve him for a second.  
  
  


* * *

Doctors Stern and Kamski are already seated together at opposite sides of the circular boardroom table when Chloe walks in, though they’ve decided to flip through files on their tablets in lieu of actually speaking. This time of day casts wavering golden bands across the stone walls where the sunlight has filtered down through water and slipped into the cool room. Behind them, a small school of parrotfish zip and dart amongst one another as the females bid for a chance to choose their desired mate. 

That time of year is already well upon them. Chloe takes a seat to Elijah’s left with enough space to give herself some breathing room and opens up her note taking app to record any necessary minutes. She’s already checked and noticed that every security camera in the room has been turned to face toward the wall, and the activation lights on them are no longer blinking.

“Thank you for joining us,” Amanda says, looking up from over the tops of her glasses with a thin smile. “Now we can begin discussing some of the more pressing matters at hand.” 

She sets her tablet aside and finally shifts toward her fellow researcher, folding her hands neatly on the tabletop. “Tell me again, Elijah, why you think it’s pertinent to abruptly engage Connor in this program at such a late point in his life when other facilities around the world are already making advanced progress that doesn’t need to be duplicated.” 

Kamski gazes back with his own cool, unruffled expression, but Chloe immediately notices his leg begin bouncing under the table. 

“There’s no reason we can’t strive to further our own studies and expand the programs here at the facility,” he says. “Connor may be inexperienced across the board, but that doesn’t mean he can’t adapt and learn as we go. He’s currently in the prime of his life and well within the range of peak breeding years—don’t tell me the opportunity to produce and raise our own hatchlings here has never crossed your mind, Amanda.”

“It has,” Amanda concedes, raising her chin just a fraction of an inch. “But not with the inherent amount of risk you’ve forcibly placed on the situation by  _ illegally _ bringing in a wild-caught merperson, when Connor hasn’t even interacted on a friendly basis with another of his kind in a similar captive environment. For all you know, that merman might rip him apart—and then where will we be?” 

Kamski steeples his fingers and taps them against his mouth, a slow, methodical movement. “We’re taking the necessary precautions so far,” he says. “The new acquisition was in strict quarantine for a week while we ruled out any bloodborne or genetic diseases, and now he’s in a separate holding tank while we proceed. You saw for yourself on the underwater footage—they’ve been interacting without any aggressive behavior whatsoever.”

“Maybe not aggressive behavior towards each other,” Amanda snaps. “Which doesn’t account for the shipman who mysteriously died at sea last month, or the diver who is now two fingers short of a full set. He’s lucky he didn’t lose his entire hand or worse, Elijah! How long do you think we can keep this a secret if things progress at a downward trend? Tell me again how keeping a wild and deadly set of hyper-intelligent mammals worked out for Sea World.” 

Chloe is no longer taking notes, though she pretends to look very intently at something on her tablet nonetheless. Two seats away, she can hear the subtle change in Elijah’s breathing. 

“We aren’t dealing with killer whales, Doctor Stern,” he says, eerily calm. “And I have no intention of turning the facility here into a hackneyed tourist attraction. What I’m trying to do, with your  _ assistance _ , is in strict pursuance of scientific research. I want to exceed the studies the other biologists have done. I want to be the first facility in the western world to successfully cross-breed a domesticated and wild specimen. My God, Amanda, the prestige alone would fund this place for the next ten years.”

Amanda nods, jaw set, and lets out a soft sigh. “In that case,” she says, picking up her tablet, “I imagine you won’t be needing the annual stipend, nor my assistance in this new endeavor of yours. I’m pulling funding on everything  _ but _ Connor’s ongoing wellness supervision and letting you proceed however you see fit, but the rest of this? Won’t be on my dime, Elijah.” 

Once she’s gone, Dr. Kamski bows his head for a long moment and doesn’t move. Chloe waits, and watches, and then pushes her own chair back from the table. 

“If every visionary in this world waited for permission from people not willing to give it, we’d still be banging rocks together in ice caves and wiping our asses with sticks,” he says, looking up abruptly with his eyes too-bright behind his glasses. “You know that, right?” 

Chloe stands, gathering up her things against her chest. “You got me this job, Elijah,” she says, hesitating only a moment before she elaborates. “I’ve always trusted you know exactly what you’re doing.”

As she walks out and leaves him there, he’s bent over and studying the pale palms of his hands, scrutinizing them in the bluish marine light. Almost like he’s looking for the blood there, a sight somehow yet unseen.  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The better part of a week passes before Connor is lured back into his grotto and secured there once more. He waits, restless and full of nerves on Hank’s behalf, wondering what’s about to happen to the other mer. Dr. Kamski and Chloe haven’t revealed anything particularly telling over the past few days, though Chloe has been monitoring his blood more than usual. She doesn’t say why.

An hour passes, and then another. Connor watches the light change through the water and when he hears another brief commotion, an abrupt struggle that only lasts a handful of seconds at the most, he fears the worst, though trying to think of what they’ve possibly done to Hank is no simple task. It eats at him anyway, even when the water is all calm and quiet again and the fish and eels tentatively come back out of their hiding places. 

Even though he’s been separated by a barrier this whole time, Connor has come to enjoy his proximity near Hank. Listening to him talk about much of anything at all is far more interesting than keeping his own company or sunbathing alone in the lagoon, although Hank is sometimes prone to dark moods and sulking spells where he won’t come out to visit. But when he does, he’s as charming and gruff as can be, telling stories of the deep or teaching Connor about things he’s seen in different parts of the ocean. His eyes crinkle and the odd little gap between his two front teeth sometimes shines through the muzzle as he talks, and Connor’s eyes are inexplicably drawn to it without fail every time, like a magpie’s eye to a piece of finery.

He thinks he and Hank are friends, by now. Maybe. Or, at least—he very much hopes so.

For that reason, Connor doesn’t waste any time in rushing out of his grotto when at long last, another unbearable hour later, he’s finally freed from confinement. He darts through the water like a sailfish, looking for any signs of Hank or evidence he may be gone. Every nook and cranny of the rocks and reefs beneath the surface prove empty, and at long last Connor surfaces and heaves in a deep, panting breath he hadn’t realized he’d been needing.

A voice doesn’t call to him, but a low whistle rings across the lagoon. Connor immediately tracks the sound to the beach, where Hank is sprawled in the shallow water on the beach, looking a little disheveled but otherwise whole and healthy. 

It takes Connor a few long beats, as he rushes over, before he fully grasps that the cage on Hank’s face has been removed. 

“What happened?” Connor says as he wades into the shallows, suddenly unsure of himself now that there’s no barrier between them. “What did they do?” 

“Shh,” Hank whispers, still not using words to speak. He points toward the above-ground grotto and holds out a hand, beckoning Connor nearer. It’s an awkward movement, beaching himself to be near the larger merman, but Connor reaches for him and feels a jolt of something hot shoot up his spine when Hank’s warm hand grasps his own and pulls him in close. 

“They’re watching and listening,” Hank rasps into his ear. “Everything we say and do.” 

Connor knows this; he’s always known this, and yet, it’s a foregone truth he’s accepted and lived with for as long as he can remember. He’s never really found any reason to question it until now.

“Come with me,” he says softly, still holding tight to Hank’s hand, somehow uncaring that they see  _ this. _ “There’s a better place—under.” 

One of the pools in his grotto dips low into a wide U-bend and then opens up above in an above-ground room carved into the rock. There’s a viewing window there for anybody who’d like to watch him sleep, but Connor can’t be bothered with that right now, so long as they’re not out in the open for the whole entire world to see from their eagle-eyed watchtowers and cameras. 

Hank’s swimming is a little cumbersome but he keeps up with Connor’s pace easily. When they slip between the rocks into the deepest grotto and surface in the nesting room, he lets out a rush of relieved oxygen and suddenly seems to understand, too, the strange, magnetic magnitude of their meeting.

“Sorry,” Hank mumbles apologetically, sprawling out heavily on the dry kelp bed. “They doped me again. Every fuckin’ time.” 

“At least the cage is gone,” Connor says, and immediately—without even thinking twice—reaches over to touch the silver whiskers around Hank’s jaw. Some of the hair at his chin has grown longer than the rest, woven and tied into a small braid. Connor’s never had facial hair of his own, and the allure of its charming strangeness is too great a temptation to resist.

“You’re a handsy one, huh?” Hank mutters, a crease drawn between his brows even though he doesn’t make any move to push Connor away. “Five minutes in and already on first base.” 

“And  _ you _ are very hairy,” Connor says brightly, now curiously touching the hair on Hank’s upper chest with light fingers. “I didn’t know our kind could sprout as much hair as humans.”

“Living in the Atlantic will do that to a guy,” Hank grunts, watching Connor from down the bridge of his nose. “You enjoying yourself?” 

Connor presses his fingertips into one of the older, deeper whorls of scar tissue on Hank’s shoulder. It’s soft and gnarled at the same time, a strange texture beneath his touch. 

“You’ve been in many battles,” Connor says, surveying the rest of the marks on Hank’s chest and belly. “It seems like you’ve had a difficult life in the ocean.” 

“What, are you a shrink or something?” Hank says, pulling away slightly. He reaches up to rub around his jaw and sighs, tipping his head back again in defeat. “The battles aren’t the hard part, kid. It’s what you lose sometimes when you can’t win them.” 

Connor’s forehead furrows as he thinks, a damp curl falling against his temple as he leans over. “What kinds of things have you lost?” he asks. 

“Everything,” Hank says, but smiles sadly and then turns away to get comfortable in the kelp bed. His tailfin brushes up against Connor’s and the contact is maddening in a way Connor wants to pursue and understand without knowing why. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Hank says, clearly intent on pretending to sleep as he lets out a deep breath and closes his eyes and gills both. “That’s a conversation for a different day.”

Connor supposes it’ll be okay for him to keep close and so, with nothing better to do for the time being, he simply curls up next to Hank and thinks of what this new physical closeness may come to mean. Everything feels new and familiar at the same time, shiny but well-worn with familiar grooves. He wonders what more time could buy them, in this strange relationship where they came together through no real choice of their own. 

It’s hard, in this quiet moment of newfound companionship, not to think about Dr. Kamski’s question about desire.   
  
  


* * *

The days seem to stretch longer, somehow, when Hank is around. Connor both relishes in the fact and also dreads it: longer days give him longer hours to overthink and run every what-if scenario into the ground, even with a new companion filling up the emptiness he never even knew he had in his life. Having somebody else to care for has supplied him with a whole new world of worry where none ever existed before. 

Dr. Kamski stays distant and Chloe, even, only draws Connor’s blood through the safety of a barred caretaker’s window built into the side of the enclosure. The lagoon is restocked with feeder fish and squid at least once a week and Hank uses the opportunity to teach Connor his own methods of hunting and catching prey. He’s fast, and skilled beyond anything Connor’s seen. Even within the confines of their tank, watching him move and swim is impressive, especially when he overtakes and immobilizes a grown octopus with a single swift bite that kills it instantly.

They share the catch and then laze on the beach to soak up the mild springtime sun. Everything seems to go over without a hitch. That is, at least, until the day the landscaper has to come into the grotto.

Connor’s never been bothered with the man, content to peacefully watch him prune the bushes and trees and rake the sand into some semblance of order. This has been a weekly feature of his entire life and he and his caretakers coexist in quiet harmony. 

When the gate opens and the landscaper wanders in with his wheelbarrow of tools and organic fertilizers, Hank is nowhere to be seen. Connor sits up on the beach and realizes with a start that he hadn’t even realized the other mer was even gone—an arm’s length away from him one minute and spirited away into thin air the next. 

“Hello, Connor,” the landscaper says, amiably enough as he goes to start tending to a mangrove tree at the edge of the water. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” 

“It is,” Connor answers, arms leaden with heady adrenaline he doesn’t know how to use. The landscaper is an older but playful sort of human, and he picks up a dead palm frond from the ground and pretends to lunge in Connor’s direction with it brandished like a sword.

“En garde!” the man says, laughing in jest, and Connor’s suddenly acutely aware that something bad is about to happen, but the decision to rush into the water and get between the landscaper and the corner of the lagoon is made a fraction of a second too late.

The man has only just bent at the waist to begin pruning with a pair of garden shears, whistling while he works, and never even sees the shadow rapidly approaching in the blue. He gets out two short notes and then there’s a flash of movement and water and then a horrible half-shout as two bodies crash beneath the surface of the water. All is still for a moment, and then the thrashing starts. 

“Hank!” Connor screams, scrambling for the depths. “Let him go!”

He wrestles his way into the water and immediately sees the dark blood. The paralyzing fear that the landscaper is already dead flashes across his senses, but then he sees that the garden shears are still in the man’s hand and Hank is the one bleeding.

“Stop,” Connor pleads, trying to wrestle the human away from Hank like a stolen plaything. “ _ Hank! _ Please, he’s done nothing wrong.” 

The siren sounds above them in the air and the noise makes Hank pause long enough for Connor to get a grip on the drowning landscaper. He pulls him free with all his strength and then takes him by the upper arm and beneath the chin, hauling the human to the surface for air before dragging him up onto the beach. 

Hank surfaces a few seconds later as the landscaper lays gasping, still clutching the garden shears for dear life and feebly coughing up water. As Hank’s torso rises up out of the lagoon, Connor can see the deep gash in his upper arm, weeping purplish blood in rivulets as water runs off his body. 

“He wasn’t hurting you?” Hank says, sounding mildly confused. He seems completely oblivious to the deep gash in his bicep. “I thought...shit, I don’t even know anymore.”

The gate buzzes as the wailing siren cuts off abruptly and then a group of armed staff members are bustling in. 

“Hey, boys,” Hank says, greeting them with a grim smile. They seem shocked to hear him speak in a language they can understand but still don’t lower their weapons. “Guess I just royally fucked my clean streak, huh? Damn.” 

Dr. Kamski walks in a few moments later, in his lab coat, with an incensed expression on his face. “So it’s Hank, then?” he calls out, marching along the beach without fear until he’s at the edge of the lagoon within spitting distance of Connor and the sodden landscaper. “You certainly are giving me quite the run for my money.”

“I do what I can,” Hank says coolly, squinting hard in the sunlight. 

“What are you waiting for?” Kamski spits as he rounds on the nearest man holding a tranq rifle, and before Hank can dive below the surface another sedative dart zips through the air and hits him square in the meaty part of his chest. 

Hank roars out something and yanks the needle from his muscle with one big paw, but it’s already too late. He draws in a deep, shuddering breath and manages to look toward Connor just before he slumps over into the water. 

“Help him inside,” Dr. Kamski says to the men standing frozen on the beach, nodding toward the rattled landscaper. “And somebody fish the big one out of the water so we can dress the wound in his shoulder. I won’t have him dying from sepsis for nothing. Move aside, Connor, if you would,” Dr. Kamski adds, before his voice turns cold and unlike anything Connor’s heard before. “If you infringe on procedural action there will be corresponding consequences.” 

Connor silently nods, feeling stung, and slips away, wishing he could go to Hank but knowing it’d be against both of their best interests. Hank is taken away into the indoor infirmary tank and stays there well into the evening until he’s brought back and allowed to rejoin Connor. He returns with sutures in his arm and no other bandage or dressing, the purified saltwater more beneficial to the wound than anything else they could apply to it. He is on antibiotic injections, though, and tells Connor as much even if he doesn’t fully understand the need. 

“I’ve lived 53 years without needing any of that shit,” Hank grouses, and despite his foul mood Connor’s never been more thankful to see him. “Rub some kelp paste in it, I’ll be fine.” 

A week later, when it’s the landscaper’s scheduled day to come tidy up the beach in the lagoon again, he never shows. But a few hours before dark, the gate buzzes open and two armed men come in, flanking the scruffy man in the custodial jumpsuit as he carries in a wheelbarrow full of gardening tools. 

Connor doesn’t come up onto the beach, this time, though he does curiously watch from a distance while the man works. He must’ve volunteered to take over the landscaper’s duties, at least while they search for another replacement. He’s obviously not used to working with tropical and marine plants, but he works quickly and prunes back the overgrowth with fast chops of a machete. 

Several yards away, Connor pulls his upper body up onto a rock to watch. The men with their weapons watch him carefully from behind dark sunglasses, but Connor knows he isn’t the one they’re looking out for. Their eyes soon swivel back to the shoreline and water, intent on catching sight of the wilder merman. 

“What’s your name?” Connor asks, making the stout man look up quickly enough that his hair ruffles in the branches of a dune willow. “I’ve only seen you a few times before.” 

“Uh,” the man says, looking over at the armed men and stalling while he waits to see if they’ll react. When they don’t, he eyeballs Connor warily and clears his throat before focusing back on the task at hand. “Reed. Or...Gavin, I guess.” 

“Like the plant,” Connor says, and then eases himself down on the rocks to watch as Gavin begins raking the powdery sand free of debris. “I’m Connor, by the way.” 

“I know,” Gavin says, eyes glancing up and then back down again in a flash. “I guess you’re not the one who’s batshit fucking crazy, huh? Your boyfriend’s got me doing my own work plus the goddamn gardener’s now.”

“Hey,” one of the armed men says, shaking his head slowly from side to side. Reed’s jaw tightens but he doesn’t argue, only mumbling in a low voice, “Fuck, it’s true.” 

Connor feels guilty but doesn’t entirely know why. Even so, he feels emboldened enough to say, “I think Hank is misunderstood. This has been a difficult transition for him to make.”

“Tell me about it,” Gavin snorts, but he isn’t prepared for Connor to take that literally at face value. 

“Well, going from open freedom to restricted confinement in a short time span has obviously been stressful for him,” Connor says. “I don’t guess I’d know much about it, though. I’ve lived here my whole life.” 

“I can empathize,” Gavin says, still working with quick whisks of his rake. “Spent a few years locked in the state pen. It’s not an easy adjustment to make.” 

Connor doesn’t know what a state pen is, exactly, but before he can ask, one of the armed men silences the custodian with a few stern words. 

“You weren’t brought in here to socialize with the specimens, Mr. Reed.” 

And so Gavin works in silence for the next few minutes, tidying up the lagoon to the best of his limited ability. It looks a little sloppy and over-pruned in places, but it’ll have to do for now. 

“Thank you,” Connor says when Gavin goes to pack up his tools and leave. “Hank says thank you too, I’m sure.” 

Gavin snorts at that but doesn’t otherwise fire anything back. He does briefly stop to gaze in Connor’s direction with a strange, unreadable expression on his face, though. Green eyes narrowed and thoughtful, like a poor man pausing just long enough to listen to a caged bird sing.  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really appreciate the lovely comments on chapter 1, so thank you for that ❤️ When you write for a printed zine it's hard to get any feedback from the peanut gallery, d'oh! How we writers suffer 😂
> 
> As for chapters 3 and 4, I think I'll just stick to the schedule I've already laid out so far. Next chapter will be posted on Saturday afternoon, and the final one will be up next Wednesday afternoon a week from today. Just to give people a few days to catch up and so I don't spam the Hank/Connor tag too badly. (MERM SEX NEXT UPDATE, I swear lmao!)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW, if needed, for the loss of merm virginity? Merginity, as it were, lmao. It's pretty gentle and intimate but also kinda slimy.

  
  
Chloe seems restless when she draws Connor’s routine blood work the next day, lacking her usual patience and carefulness as her hands shake some while she fills the sample vials.  Connor looks between her pallid face without its usual perky pinkness in the cheeks and then at his bluish blood slowly leaving his body.

“What’s wrong, Chlo?” he asks, using the softer pet name he likes to feel roll off his tongue. “You can tell me.” 

Chloe laughs quietly and glances up at him, shaking her head. “Just been working hard,” she says. “Lots of late nights helping out in the lab, you know.” 

Connor tips his head to the side, feeling a new question well up inside of him. There’s a likely chance she won’t answer him, brush it off and deflect the conversation elsewhere, but if he doesn’t ask he’ll never know either way. 

“Why have you been drawing my blood so much lately?” he asks, feeling like the answer is just beneath the surface somewhere. “But not Hank’s.”

An awkward pause of silence stretches between them, Chloe bent awkwardly to remove the needle from Connor’s tailfin through the steel bars meant to protect her. She sighs, slips the vials of blood into her lab coat pocket, and snaps her one purple glove off. 

“We’re checking the progression of your fertility and marking any changes,” she says simply. “Dr. Kamski’s orders.” 

“Oh,” Connor says, looking away toward the lagoon. “I suppose I could have guessed that.” 

Another strange pause floats in the humid air, and then Connor says, drawing in a sharp intake of breath, “I haven’t—with Hank.” He flushes hot, wishing this wasn’t something they needed to discuss at all. “He hasn’t brought it up with me. I’m not sure if I know...what to do, exactly. Or when.” 

Chloe’s smile tightens into something almost painful at the edges. “I won’t be chemically suppressing your heat cycle this season,” she says. “You may find that your partner knows what to do. But, it may be something...you want to discuss with him in the meantime. Sooner rather than later, so you’re prepared.” 

Connor blinks at that, searching her face. “Prepared for what?” 

When Chloe sighs, she turns and looks away, not meeting the mer’s gaze. “Dr. Kamski is more than willing to coerce you in a number of ways if you don’t make the choice on your own,” she says, and then lets her eyes drop to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. 

After she’s taken the blood away for testing and left Connor alone there at the edge of the lagoon, he sits and thinks for a time, doing nothing more than watching the sun’s shadow move across the water as late afternoon steadily approaches. A fish jumps somewhere, and the birds call out to one another as they pass by overhead, never landing for even a brief visit. 

Connor finds Hank laying out their evening meal on the rocks in the far corner of the enclosure, steadily scraping the scales away from fish meat with an empty shell. He looks handsome, in Connor’s eyes, even with a furrow of concentration between his brows. A large and imposing figure bent to the will of a tedious task, intent on feeding both himself and Connor. 

He looks up when Connor approaches, eyes warm and inviting, and sets his shell aside. Another moment passes and then Hank’s expression shifts, some form of awareness flashing across his features. “What’s wrong?” he asks. 

“I need to talk to you about something,” Connor says. “Away from everything.” 

It isn’t an easy conversation to have, but Connor lays out what he knows in small morsels of truth like he’s setting polished stones down in front of Hank to examine. The other merman listens intently, features focused but otherwise unreadable. When Connor’s finished explaining the situation they face, he reaches up and scratches through the whiskers on his face and lets out a deep breath. 

“What do  _ you _ want, Connor?” Hank asks, quietly. “In life. In this place. Whatever.” 

The question knocks Connor off balance, rattling him in a way he wouldn’t have anticipated. “What do I— _ me? _ ” he sputters out, feeling that cursed flush return to heat up his throat and chest. “I’m not sure if anybody’s ever asked me that before and really meant it.” 

“See, that’s what I hate about all this,” Hank says. “You’ve never been given a choice. You can’t even really choose what you want to eat for fucking dinner here, because they’ve already chosen for you.”

Connor rolls that truth around his mind like a pearl, accepting it for what it is. “You don’t have a choice this time, either,” he says, and that’s what makes him afraid. That’s what makes his voice shake when he says, rasping, “I don’t want them to hurt you, Hank. And I don’t want to lose you now that you’re here with me.” 

Hank’s stony expression crumples some and he holds open an arm, beckoning the other mer closer. “Hey now,” he says, tucking Connor against his broad side. “Don’t think like that. They haven’t offed me yet, huh? It ain’t that easy, plus I’m what you’d call a _ large asset _ .” 

But even with Connor pressed close and all his teasing, Hank still reaches up with his other hand and pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“This isn’t how these things are supposed to happen,” he sighs. “I should be wooing you and romancing you across the fuckin’ Atlantic and back. Because you deserve that much, and not this shitty hand we’ve been dealt by that asshole in his lab coat.” 

Connor closes his eyes while he thinks, tipping his head over onto Hank’s shoulder. “Do you have a mate where you came from?” he asks. “And—children?” 

“Not for a long time, now,” Hank says softly, which surprises Connor when he hears it. “It’s just easier for me to be alone, since… well. Since losing Cole.” 

Hank clears his throat, letting that settle between them before he continues. 

“No real easy way to say it, but I lost my son. He swam too far from me, and—the ocean isn’t forgiving, Connor. Never goddamn has been. Cole was my one and only, my pride and joy, y’know,” Hank continues, voice sounding a little raw. “I carried him myself, hatched him myself. I didn’t think I could ever replace him, or try to. Just wasn’t in the cards for me.” 

“I’m sorry, Hank,” Connor whispers, slowly opening his eyes. When he turns his face, Hank’s mouth is right there, eyes gazing over at him from beneath sparse lashes. “I’ve never lost anyone like that.” 

“You’ve lost plenty,” Hank murmurs, reaching over to squeeze Connor’s arm. “They just took it away from you before you were even born.” 

It’s painfully, terribly true. But Hank is so warm, here in the enclave of the grotto, and the trickling water sounds soft and soothing. Connor may be naive, but he thinks he knows what he wants, now. He can feel it coursing through him, but unlike the flaring, insatiable burn of his heats, this is markedly different. 

It’s...nice. It doesn’t hurt or feel uncomfortable, either. Not even a little bit. 

“Can I kiss you?” he asks Hank, and Hank laughs outright at that—muscles jumping in his belly and side as the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkle. Connor’s hand has reached to touch his injured shoulder, fingers light where they’re pressed at the edge of the healing sutures there. 

“Have you ever kissed anybody before?” Hank asks, voice low and kind. His breath tickles Connor’s face, salty and pleasant, and Connor leans in another inch closer and can’t stop, doesn’t want to stop, until he feels his lips brush Hank’s for a chaste, whiskery kiss. 

He blushes, smiling all the same, and Hank doesn’t move away but arches an eyebrow, lips still slightly parted. 

“Yes,” Connor rasps, dimples deepening on his face as a big hand comes up to cup his jaw. 

“Good,” Hank rumbles, leaning back in. “Now we can practice.”    
  


* * *

  
  
Their ultimatum comes bright and early on a Sunday morning. Most of the facility staff are at home on their day off, Chloe included, but Kamski still walks onto the lagoon’s beach with three armed security personnel. He’s barefoot himself, hands in the pockets of his cuffed chinos, shirt flapping in the breeze. His hair is tied back but already coming loose to whip in brown tendrils around his face. 

“Connor, Hank,” he says, waiting for the mermen to surface and come closer. “A word.” 

Connor sits there in the shallow water lapping against the sand, sensing the strange tension in the air almost immediately. Hank is more reluctant to listen, though he warily pulls himself out of the water to balance on a sunning rock, thick arms crossed at his chest, jaw set. 

Kamski smiles, thin, tight-lipped, even though this was never meant to be a friendly visit.

“I won’t keep you long, but I wanted to make myself abundantly clear while I have your undivided attention,” he says. “As you’re probably aware by now, your enduring care and safety here now has an insurance policy of sorts placed on it, effective immediately. Whereas I was content before to let nature take its course in due time, as it were, I’ve realized that when nature thinks it has a surplus of free will, my patience tends to run thin.” 

Part of Connor has always known, deep down, that he couldn’t fully trust Kamski. That is a grain of truth buried inside the long-ago forged walls of captivity and dependency. In ten years, they have never been friends, and certainly not family. There was a time in Connor’s life where he would swim into Dr. Stern’s lap and listen to her read stories in the shallow wading pool, but Connor has always been Specimen 800 in Elijah Kamski’s eyes, even as he was taught and nurtured and made stronger. He always will be.

“Your reproductive cycle should go into full effect in a matter of days, if not hours,” Dr. Kamski says, looking unwaveringly at Connor. “Now, the widespread prestige of this facility and ongoing dependency hinges on one primary thing, and that’s producing an effective and sustainable breeding program to extend our research where it was widely limited before. Do you understand, Connor?” 

Connor nods weakly, even if his head feels full of stones. “I think so.”

“Hank, and you?” Kamski calls out through the hazy morning air. “Look alive out there. I know you’re not as dumb as you’d like me to think.” 

Hank tips his chin up, eyeing Kamski across the water. An uncrossable bridge between them. Kamski, standing on the soles of his human feet, will never be able to cross that gap. 

“How about this, boss,” Hank says. “You can go and get thoroughly _ fucked _ , because Connor isn’t your personal plaything. And neither am I, for that matter.”

Kamski laughs breathlessly, eyes downcast like he’s sharing a particularly funny joke with the sand. When he looks up again, his gaze glimmers behind the lenses of his glasses. 

“I had a feeling you wouldn’t be so forthcoming, Hank,” he says. “So allow me to clarify.” 

“Every day you don’t breed and refuse to contribute to the ongoing longevity of this program at its inception, I’m going to take something. Maybe I’ll start small, start cutting out bisections of your tailfin. Maybe we’ll go old school and take a finger each day—but that’s immaterial to me right now. Because we’ll put you back in the ocean, Hank. God knows I don’t want you here any longer than necessary after the money and trouble you’ve caused me. But make no mistake when I tell you you’ll wish, dearly, you hadn’t crossed me along the way.”

Hank growls, leaning forward at the challenge. “You might as well kill me now and get it over with,” he says. “Go ahead and do it, you sick little fucker. I’m waiting.” 

“What, and immediately harvest your seminal fluid and inject it into Connor anyway once you’re dead?” Kamski says brightly. “That would actually make things easier for me, and trust me—I’ve already considered it. But it doesn’t look as nice on paper as the happy family unit narrative, sad to say. We can’t win the Nobel Prize in good conscience if I gut you like a spawning salmon for your biological contribution to the cause.”

Hank slips back into the water, swimming closer to shore until he’s behind Connor. The men train their guns on him, all three pointed at his head. 

“Why would your good fucking conscience matter then if it doesn’t matter now?” Hank asks. 

Kamski sighs, slipping his hands back into his pockets. “I’m not asking you to psychoanalyze me,” he says. “I’m telling you to do what animals do, like the creatures you are, or face dire consequences. Are we on the same page?” 

Neither Hank nor Connor speak. Gulls cry out from somewhere in the distance, and the only movement for a few beats is the breeze in the lagoon and the slight mist hanging above the water. 

“I’ll take your compliance in stride, then,” Kamski says, nodding curtly. “I expect to see nothing but good results once the breeding cycle initiates itself.”

He moves to leave, signaling to the armed security officers. One takes the lead and Kamski follows after him at a leisurely pace. “Oh, and Connor?” he mentions, briefly turning at the gate. “Don’t let me down.” 

When they’re alone again, it takes all of Connor’s resolve not to put his face in his hands and cry. He wants to, but he doesn’t want to look weak in front of Hank. They both have to be strong through this. Together. Falling apart isn’t going to help either of them, now. 

Even so, when Connor turns to look at the other merman, there are tears shining in his eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Hank,” Connor croaks, feeling wretched. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

Hank moves through the lagoon, slides to a stop on the sandy bottom at Connor’s side where they rest in the shallow water. “Listen, sweetheart,” he says, cupping a hand around Connor’s side and leaning in to kiss the soft line of skin on his hip before it all turns to cerulean scales. “None of this is your fault. If anybody had to be here, I’m glad it was me—because we’re gonna work through stuff together, right? Just a rookie and some old washed-up old timer, doing our best. I’m not gonna leave you high and dry.”

Connor chokes out something between a laugh and a sob, and he wants to fold himself down into Hank’s embrace, so he does. It doesn’t matter that they’re being watched anymore. Not when they’re always watching. 

“You should be in the ocean,” Connor says, voice warm against Hank’s collarbone. “Not in this place with me.” 

Hank nods but rubs his palm up and down Connor’s back, trying to be soothing. “I think it’s a good thing they fished me out of the big drink,” he says. “You know why?” 

“No,” Connor says after a moment, choked with guilt he doesn’t know how to voice. 

“Because I’ll always remember it,” Hank says, tipping forward to brush his lips at Connor’s temple. “And remembering it gives me hope. That’s something they can’t take away.” 

Connor tries to let those words hearten him, and they help, but they don’t change the grave reality of the situation. They certainly don’t change what has to be done.

“I wish we were there right now,” Connor says. 

“Me too, baby,” Hank answers. “Me too.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
It takes another two days of enthusiastic kissing and tentative petting, never anything more, but when Connor’s heat finally hits it sweeps through him like a lightning storm. Something breaks inside him like a dropped flask, an instantaneous shattering, and then the warmth and an empty, aching need spreads from the top of his head to the tip of his tailfin. 

Hank notices the very moment it happens. 

“Huh,” he says, pulling his lips away from the junction between Connor’s neck and shoulder, gills fluttering a bit, chest briefly flushing periwinkle. His eyes dilate and he presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, holding Connor’s new scent there. “Your heat.” 

If fish could sweat underwater, Connor would be dripping. He nods, already feeling slightly strangled by an invisible force he has no real control over. It’s been many years since this cycle wasn’t chemically stopped and he’s never once missed the bizarre, fugue-like discomfort of it all. If Hank looked physically appealing before, he somehow looks even more maddeningly good now. It’s difficult to think about anything else but being consumed by him. 

Very abruptly, Connor wants.  _ Needs. _ And the meaning of Dr. Kamski’s word, desire, comes into a singular clarity as big and bright as the full moon. 

He wants to fight it. He also, so desperately, wants to give in.

“Why hasn’t it happened to you?” Connor asks, pulling away slightly to try and regain some sense of physical control of his body. 

“Not my time,” Hank says simply, shrugging one shoulder. “The older we get, the less it happens. I haven’t had many since...well.” 

His eyes dart away for a moment, throat bobbing in place. It’s the most vulnerable Hank’s ever looked in Connor’s eyes. 

“Since I had Cole.” 

They’re laying under the thin shade of some coconut palms, previously enjoying the warm sand as afternoon gradually gives way to evening, but Connor now begins to tremble some with the sensation of fever. Hank sits up to get a better look at him, seemingly caught between the want to reach for the other merman and keep his hands to himself. 

“Connor, listen…” he says at long last. “I know what that shitstain Kamski said, and I know...what’s at risk, here. But if you don’t want to go through with this—”

“And let him hurt you like that?” Connor rasps miserably, rounding on Hank. “Like you don’t matter? Like my life is more important than yours somehow?” 

Hank colors some at that, not quite meeting Connor’s eye. “I didn’t say that, but…you’re a lot younger than me.” He draws in a rattling breath, trying to laugh. “You have more to live for.” 

“In this aquarium tank?” Connor says, throwing out a hand toward everything surrounding them. “This place where I’ve lived alone with nobody but the people who study me for as long as I can remember? That’s nothing, Hank. Nothing worth dying over.” 

Hank watches him, blue eyes looking heavy and timeless, burdened with a hard life lived at the mercy of the ocean—and now the mercy of human beings. He finally does reach for Connor, then, only touch his forearm, warm hand light and tentative there. The beginning of a question.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” he asks. “With me.” 

Connor smiles, sad, and reaches up to lay his palm over the back of Hank’s hand. “Like I said before, we have no choice,” he says. “But I’m still choosing you.” 

Hank smiles, shaking his head fondly. “C’mon then,” he says, slipping his fingers into Connor’s grasp. “Take me where you want to go.” 

  
  
  


They move beneath the water together, back to the narrow pool that leads up into the hidden part of the grotto. In the depths of the cool cave Connor turns toward Hank with a strange brightness in his eyes, a mixture of curiosity, fear, and the soft glow of affection. Wariness is there, too, and Hank has to wonder if it’s him or the rest of it making Connor so afraid of what comes next. 

They’ve become friends and tentative lovers during this brief interlude, and maybe even a hint of something more, but they haven’t had the months or years they need to forge a true mating bond. Connor has no concept of that, but Hank does, and the lack of it makes this that much harder to bear.

Connor trembles enough that it makes his bottom lip quiver until he bites down on it, but when Hank settles down in the kelp nest and opens the circle of his arms Connor goes into them willingly. His trust eases some of the pain, and Hank holds him like he would any of the other lovers he knew in the distant memories of his past life. He owes this young merman that much.

“I don’t want them to see,” Connor whispers, webbed fingers spread against the scarred skin on Hank’s back as he clutches at him. “But they see everything. Always.” 

Hank smiles, sadly, and tries to push down the swell of anger clawing up the back of his throat if only for Connor’s sake. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever truly see the deep blue ocean again, but he decides not to tell Connor that. Their only chance at surviving together, now, is within the confines of compliance. And if compliance means producing a clutch as a breeding pair, then so be it. 

“One day,” Hank says, gently stroking the shimmering scales on Connor’s throat, “I’ll show you my home. Maybe we’ll do this again because it  _ is _ our choice, Connor. Not because we have to.” 

Connor’s dark eyes find Hank’s, some of the fear from before gone and replaced with the kind of resolve needed to see it made so. “I want to,” he says, firmly. “With you.” 

The faint glow of sunlight works hard to reach the makeshift ocean floor here, shining down through a small crag in the rocks overhead, but nonetheless a telltale, tiny, blue blinking light is set back into the grotto’s lava rock—transmitting their every move and motion to somewhere where somebody is watching. Hank turns his broad back toward it and pulls Connor close to his chest, doing his best to shield him from view. 

“Like this,” he says, twining their tail fins in a loose lover’s knot, and when their smooth pelvic scales rub together Connor shivers and seems to get the idea. “They can’t see you. Just focus on me and what feels good, sweetheart. That’s all you gotta do.” 

Connor stays close, pressed there between Hank’s bulk and the grotto wall. He loops his arms around Hank’s neck and breathes out a rush of oxygen he’d been holding in, gills flaring and then laying flat as he tries to relax. Hank reaches down between them and presses around the edges of his slit, probing until his first two fingers slip into the spongy heat of Connor’s body. 

“Oh,” Connor gasps, lashes already fluttering closed. His belly contracts and then the slit widens, already leaking warm slime out into Hank’s hand. “Hank, I’ve never…I haven’t—” 

“Shh, I know,” Hank murmurs, crooking his fingers up to find the velvety sleeve nestled beneath Connor’s taut cocksheath. He pushes deeper, up to the last knuckle, and Connor outright mewls against his throat. “I won’t hurt you.” 

Hank feels his own cock begin to stir, traitorous in a way, but it’s what Connor’s body is asking for. The slit low under his belly tingles, waiting to drop open to let his length and own slime slip out, but he tries to put it off while he explores the depths of Connor’s hole. 

“You feel that?” Hank asks, stroking along the outer rim of what his cock will soon fill. Connor’s body feels tight, but not so tight that he can’t tickle the sensitive flesh enough to make it flutter and open to let him in further, deeper. “That’s where I fit inside you.” 

“Please, Hank,” Connor gasps, fingers digging into his shoulders hard enough to bruise. He sounds desperate, and from his own past heats Hank knows how brightly that ache burns. “Let me have all of you.” 

Such a simple but intimately profound request. Hank groans, tired of his own charade, and feels his cock slip out into the space between them. The wet tip slides against Connor’s soft lower belly and he hisses at the contact, trying to hold his composure to keep this moment within the confines of something quiet and sacred. 

“Okay, alright,” Hank murmurs, reaching down to get a grip around himself. It’s been such a long time since he’s done this and the euphoria of those last few seconds before they fit together still hasn’t faded. Sliding the tip of his cock along Connor’s soaked slit elicits a keening sound from the other mer, and then Hank’s slipping inside that sweet, spongy heat, pressing all the way in before the give finally stops.

“You okay?” he asks around the gravel in his throat, trying to pet some of the tension out of Connor’s sides. “Tell me, baby.” 

“You feel so good,” Connor whispers roughly into the crook of Hank’s neck, still hanging on tight. “Oh, Hank. I never thought it’d be like this.” 

“That good, huh?” Hank says, making a fond sound low in his chest before kissing Connor’s shoulder. “I haven’t even started moving yet.” 

“Then what are you waiting for?” Connor says, squeezing that tight, velvety sleeve around Hank’s shaft, and that alone nearly leads to his undoing on the spot. 

Hank chokes out a sound and wishes they had the space and freedom to really make the most of this. He’ll have to show Connor a thing or two—another time, he tells himself. There will have to be another time. 

“Somebody’s eager,” Hank rasps , rolling his pelvis so he fucks up into Connor with a lewd squelch between them. 

His cockhead nudges something soft, plush and circular, and he knows he’s already where he needs to be. But it’ll take some more work before the breeding’s done. 

“Be a good boy and open up for me,” Hank growls, holding Connor flush to his front while he plunders into that leaking hole, thrusting in long, deep movements. “I’ve got to put a baby in you.” 

Connor comes fast and hard without any warning, squeezing around Hank’s cock enough that he swears at the sudden tightness enveloping him. A fast gush of something hot and sticky leaks from the place where they’re joined, and even with Connor rambling nonsense things in his ear Hank thrusts in, hard, and feels that tender spot finally give and unfurl for him.

It makes Connor keen again, fingers clawing red welts up Hank’s back. “Hank, _ Hank _ ,” he pants, squirming even though they can’t possibly get any closer now unless they opened each other up and climbed inside. “I f-feel you, I feel—all of you, oh fuck.”

He bears down, passage fluttering and massaging Hank’s long shaft like it was always meant to do, perfect, fucking divine, and Hank has to _ see _ , he needs to know the moment it happens, so he wraps his fingers in those sweet curls and gently pulls Connor’s head back. It’s a wordless sort of exchange, but those brown eyes look up at him, hazy and full of something Hank thought he’d never see or deserve again. It’s embarrassing how soft he’s gone for this doe-eyed merman, but that’s all he needs to tip over the edge.

The rush of seed and slime happens all at once, and Hank feels it flow out of the swollen knot inside him in a load that makes his head spin. He grinds against Connor while he pumps him full of that briny heat, fucking it up into the tight little well of Connor’s open belly. They watch each other through the pulsing aftershock of it all, pulling in oxygen hard and letting it out again while their gills needlessly flutter. Connor tightens his tail around Hank and simply slumps over, laying his head in the crook of Hank’s open elbow. He kisses everything and anything he can reach, though, even with Hank’s cockhead still plugged into his womb.

“You’re so handsome and beautiful,” he says, starry-eyed and hopelessly twitterpated, sucking a gentle, toothy love bite into the meat of Hank’s scarred shoulder. “My Hank.” 

Hank grunts out a laugh and slowly settles in while they’re still joined, facing his new mate while they laze in the grotto. The blue light steadily blinks behind him, always watching, but he could care less about that right now. All that matters are Connor’s mussed curls, how sweet he tastes when Hank leans in for a kiss. 

“Yours, huh?” he says. “I’ve never belonged to anybody before.”

“Only mine,” Connor tells him, nuzzling close, all the feverish cloud of his heat seemingly gone now. “Nobody else’s.” 

“Do you think it took?” Hank asks quietly after a few moments, petting the smooth scales along the ridge of Connor’s spine. 

“Maybe,” Connor says. And then, softly, sadly, “I hope so.” 

For now, Hank figures all he can do is be content to hold Connor in his arms. The rest will come later. In this strange place, they’ve got nothing but each other and time.   
  


* * *

  
  
  


Another Monday, another mopped fucking floor.

Gavin is squatting down with a bottle of glass cleaner and a rag, wiping the wide viewing window looking into the lagoon tank when he hears somebody walk in behind him.

“I’ve been outta cleaner for a week and I don’t know if anybody told the trust fund kid in charge of this place but mixing bleach with pisswater ain’t gonna cut it, chief,” he says before he turns around, expecting to see the maintenance director and finding a different face instead. “Oh shit, sorry Miss.  _ Fu _ —uh. Doctor, Stern.” 

“Dr. Kamski might be the acting research lead here, but I still hold down the keys to the facility,” Amanda says, eyes flashing as she steps forward. The corner of her mouth twitches and she looks down at Gavin with an arched eyebrow. “I can file a formal complaint on your behalf, though.” 

“Nah, that’s…I mean, no thank you, I’ll be okay,” Gavin sputters, standing up to his full height but continuing to furiously wipe the window. “Did you need me to take care of anything?”

“No, Mr. Reed, you’re quite alright,” Amanda says, turning to look back out into the water as Connor swims into view. A few moments pass, and then Hank is trailing along after him, the two of them silently communicating about a school of fish they’ve been tracking through the tank. “That window is clean enough to eat off of, though. Give your shoulder a rest.” 

Gavin clears his throat and steps back, dropping the window cleaner bottle into the holster loop on his jumpsuit. “So what’s the deal with these guys?” Gavin asks, turning to watch Dr. Stern’s face. “The manpower they’re using to cover the big one seems a little...excessive. Like some Scarface shit.”

“He’s proven himself a dangerous creature, but that only seems to be the case when he’s in distress or being territorial,” Amanda says. “Unfortunately for Elijah, his mere presence seems to send Hank into apoplectic fits.” 

“Hm, maybe I can see that,” Gavin says, turning to cough over one shoulder before gazing back out at Connor as he zips by and scatters the fish. “That one is nice—Connor. He looks a little fatter than the last time I saw him, though.” 

Amanda looks over, dark eyes sharp. “That’s normal, given his condition,” she says. “He should be producing a small clutch within the week.” 

Gavin makes a sour face and sucks in some air through his teeth. “A  _ what? _ You mean, he’s—that dude is pregnant?” 

“Indeed, Mr. Reed,” Amanda says with a long sigh. “That wasn’t my call, nor was it theirs, if I’m to believe some of the things we’ve passed along the grapevine,” she says. “Dr. Kamski is doing his best to initiate the beginnings of a breeding program here despite having 80% of his funding pulled.”

“That’s weird,” Gavin says, pausing while he looks mildly perplexed. “They’re—I mean, they’re fish, but they’re people, y’know? Fish people.” 

“I agree,” Amanda says, sniffing lightly while she reaches up to adjust the pendant hanging at the end of her necklace. “Which is why it makes things invariably worse, now that I’ve heard he plans to take their offspring from them.” 

“Dude’s a chode,” Gavin says before he can stop himself, letting it slip out unfiltered. He bites the tip of his tongue until the skin begins to break but Amanda only hums with her face screwed up, not saying anything to counteract it. 

“Isn’t this something a bunch of hippie kids with blue hair and tree tattoos should be outside picketing about?” Gavin continues after a beat. “Like when that one documentary sent SeaWorld down the shitter.”

“I don’t know,” Amanda says cryptically, turning to look Gavin dead in the eye. “Perhaps...if somebody here without a high profile leaked the information to the media.”

Gavin barks out a laugh, slinging his cleaning rag over one shoulder. “Good one, doc,” he says. “I’ve seen enough of prison to know what happens to a snitch. That ain’t me. Besides, the pretty blonde lady who works for you told me you’d cut me up into little pieces and turn me into fish food.”

“Did she?” Amanda asks, brows high on her forehead as she laughs. “I don’t think they’d be very partial to human flesh on a normal basis, so you should be safe for the time being.” 

“Good, but still,” Gavin says, walking back over to his custodial cart. “That big Shamu grandpa out there could probably pop my arms off like a Barbie doll. Not happening, and we’re not gonna find out.” 

Amanda smiles, watching him as he loads up his cart and wheels away toward the dark corridor. “Thank you for the conversation, Mr. Reed,” she says. “I’ll be seeing you around, I’m sure.” 

“Pleasure, doc,” Gavin says, giving her a small salute before walking away as fast as he fucking can with the custodial cart in tow without breaking into a jog.  
  
  



	4. Chapter 4

  
  
Connor’s two-month gestation period is monitored with the utmost care, including but not limited to a new enriched diet, increased vitamin boosters, weekly blood draws, and even an ultrasound taken right there, conveniently, on the shore of their lagoon. 

Hank has threatened to kill anybody who looks at him sideways, and says as much when the mood particularly strikes him. There haven’t been any new incidents of casualties—yet. But then again, maybe being in the family way has reined him in on his best behavior.

There’s also the fact that Connor wants to fuck at every possible moment. If they’re not eating, sleeping, or sunbathing, Hank’s either got his dick wet or Connor’s stuffed somewhere the sun doesn’t shine at the same time. There’s a few perks to letting your pregnant mate fuck you, the main draw being that breeding can’t happen twice, the second being that their two cocks practically corkscrewed and wrapped around each other,  _ inside Hank’s body _ , has never made him come harder in all his life.

Most merpeople are freaky but Connor takes the cake and eats it, too. 

As his taut little belly grows, just the sweetest bump of something for Hank to touch and hold onto, their time spent together turns from something that began as a necessity into something that Hank doesn’t know how he ever lived without. He starts thinking crazy shit, generally speaking, about having Connor’s babies or, Christ willing, growing two fucking legs and walking them both the fuck on out of here.

Neither will probably happen at this stage in his life, but he daydreams about it anyway.

There aren’t many signs that a merperson is about to lay their clutch outside the nesting instinct taking hold. Connor’s nest is a bed of kelp and grass tenderly tucked into a shallow hole he’s dug there in the underwater grotto. It’s not the prettiest nest Hank’s ever seen, but Connor’s proud of it, and that’s all that matters. He lights up when he sees it, more and more radiant with every passing day.

Kamski keeps himself at an arm’s distance the closer they get to full gestation. Chloe and a few techs, along with an armed escort, do most of the testing and scans without saying much more than hello or goodbye. They try in vain to decode whether the baby in utero is male or female, but Hank laughs them off and away. You can’t tell something like that looking at a computer screen.

Connor wakes and goes to his nest early one morning, just before the sun has risen. Hank finds him there, curled up on his side, stroking over the small swell of his abdomen while his gills flutter with each strange, new internal movement in his body.

“Am I supposed to be afraid?” he asks Hank a little breathlessly, eyes glassy but focused. 

“Of this?” Hank asks, settling himself at Connor’s back, protectively shaping around him. “No. I’ve done it, and a million others before you have done it. You’ll be just fine.” 

“I don’t mean that,” Connor says, voice sounding small. “I mean...what they’ll do with the baby.” 

Hank blinks at that even if he’s privately wondered the same thing to himself a thousand times. 

“I’m not sure, Con,” he says, kissing between Connor’s neck and shoulder as his hand moves lower to cup his mate’s belly. “Whatever happens, you’ve got to be strong.”

Long minutes pass and Connor grows more restless. Hank strokes along the tender slit under his abdomen, careful and slow, until it barely opens. 

“There you go,” he murmurs, hand moving up to rub soothing circles on Connor’s belly. “You’re doing so good, sweetheart. It’ll be over soon.” 

Connor nods, reaching down to take Hank’s hand in his own, threading their fingers together. He’s so strong, and fast, and unbelievably beautiful, and Hank never would’ve found him in the wild. Despite what’s happening, and despite everything at all in this fucked-up charade of a goddamn mess, he’s thankful he’s here. It feels like the kind of privilege Hank hasn’t been afforded in a long, long time.

He’s still murmuring soft words of encouragement when Connor makes a small sound of effort, body contracting, and then their first offspring slips right out, egg sac and all, into Hank’s waiting hand. 

Connor immediately relaxes and looks down at what he made with Hank. There’s not much to see, yet—only a golden, translucent caul the color of amber with the tiny little thing and its heartbeat thrumming inside. It has everything it needs to thrive and grow into a perfect baby, all they have to do is protect it and wait.

After he rests for a spell, Connor takes the soft egg to carefully tuck it down into the nest of kelp he’s made, covering the fragile thing up so it’s not exposed. Hank already knows they’ll be taking shifts in guarding the nest but for now, he’s happy to stay right where he is and share that responsibility. 

“You’re sure there aren’t any more coming?” Hank murmurs, just to be safe. He presses along Connor’s belly, not wanting any surprises, but knows he’d be glad for them anyway. Twins and triplets are more common than not, but it seems they’ve only got one new addition for the time being. 

“Just this one,” Connor says, turning in the nest so the single egg is tucked between them, still reaching for Hank anyway like he needs to touch him like a groundstone. “Stay here with me, for a little while.” 

Hank has nowhere else he’d rather be.   
  


* * *

  
  
  
The next few days pass in a strange blur without the burden of counted time. They spend the daylight hours taking turns in the nest, going back and forth between hunting and making sure the baby is covered and getting turned every so often. When the sun finally slips beneath the horizon both Hank and Connor curl up in the grotto together and rest, watching the stars wheel through the narrow opening in the rocks while Hank tells old stories about life in the sea.

Hank realizes, after a point, that it’s strange that nobody has come to harass or prod them about their egg. What with everything Connor went through both leading up to and during his pregnancy, the lack of attention has become...worrisome. 

It’s true that the surveillance devices are on them always, every hour of every day. Hank can’t even go out for a goddamn swim without somebody with a clipboard ogling him through a viewing window around the facility or the lens of a camera swiveling on its axis to follow him. 

Connor is less than perturbed about things, used to being watched so closely in every way imaginable. He’s more reluctant than Hank to leave the nest as a rule, broodiness taking over as an instinctual thing, but still goes out to feed and regularly stretch his muscles. Their individual periods of watching the nest are never consistently routine to nail down into exactness, and if Hank’s inner voice of caution is a good rule of measure, he intends on keeping it that way. 

Their first real test comes on a day the gardener’s replacement returns to prune the trees and tidy the beach. He looks even more nervous than last time, but Hank keeps a sharp eye from a distance until another person joins the man tending the plants—some nameless assistant in co-charge of stocking the feeding supply chain once every week. He waltzes out onto the beach with a chest full of ice and something that makes Hank’s mouth fill with saliva the moment he scents it: fresh sailfish. 

It’s not alive anymore, though, and the people here probably think he and Connor are both incapable of hunting one without getting skewered in the process. How naive they are.

“You boys are in for a real treat,” the guy says anyway, hefting the chest down on the beach. “Courtesy of the research team, caught fresh off the coast this morning. Have Connor come out and get a taste for himself.” 

Hank narrows his eyes. “He’s a little busy at the moment,” he says cautiously, eyeing the chest and then the mirrored lenses of the man’s sunglasses. “I’ll take some to him.” 

“No can do, boss,” the guy says with a shrug, leaning back over to pick up the ice chest like he’s not toting around a delicacy so fine that merpeople have killed each other over spoils. “This is dine-in only, no carry out.” 

Hank holds his ground and realizes he’s being played for a fool. “It’s a shame you think I’m a fuckin’ idiot,” he growls, feeling the trimmed spines in his fins vibrate with anger. 

“And a shame you’re missing out,” the guy says, already walking out. “We’ll see how you feel when pickings start getting slim.” 

Later, in the grotto, Hank restlessly keeps pulling back the kelp to see if their baby is still there, if its heart is still beating, if everything is just as it should be. Connor, who has lived on a cultivated and professionally-supplied diet his entire life, doesn’t seem to grasp Hank’s worry that they are going to be starved out. 

“Doctor Stern wouldn’t let that happen,” he says, eyes looking a touch uncertain all the same. “...Would she?” 

“Until I see this Doctor Stern for myself, I’m not passing any favorable judgement calls,” Hank tells him, checking around the grotto again as if somebody or something may be hiding in the rock crevices. “Just be careful, Connor.” 

That day and the next pass without incident. The baby turns a week old, already twice the size it was when it was born, well within the safety net of viability. There are no natural predators here but that’s only a moderate relief when you’re surrounded by  _ un _ natural ones.

Connor’s been gone for a dusk feeding a little longer than usual one evening. Hank doesn’t think much of it, guessing he’s spending time on the warm sand before the sun fully sets. Their feeding routine hasn’t changed despite his initial fears, so maybe the sailfish was a fluke after all. When you’re in a captive environment like this, Hank figures, it’s hard to quantify what’s intentional and what isn’t. He simply has to assume the offense at all times, no matter who or what’s involved. Nothing and nobody can be fully trusted or taken for granted.

That’s why, when Connor calls out for him in a panic just on the brink of nightfall, he feels the rise of fear swell in his chest. 

“Hank!  _ Hank! _ ” he keeps shouting amidst the sound of violent splashing, and after a half-second of hesitation Hank decides he’s going to do two things, in quick succession: investigate the source of whatever this is harming his mate, and then dispatch it quickly. 

He’s out of the grotto and halfway across the lagoon before he realizes everything has gone quite still, almost unnaturally so. And then, belatedly, there’s Connor, wide-eyed, swimming up beside as quietly as a ghost. 

“Did you hear that?” he whispers through the water.

“Get back—!” Hank tries to say, words ripping out of his throat, and then the net drops onto them from above.

He doesn’t remember too much from that point onward. The net is weighted, so the more they struggle the more tangled up they become. All his thrashing is for nothing, and Connor’s flailing panic at being snared doesn’t help. Then, there’s the familiar prick and burn of a needle, and the last thing Hank sees before it all goes dark is Connor’s hand stretching through the net to reach for him, grip somehow still holding on so tight.  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  


It’s purely by sheer fucking luck that Gavin accidentally lets himself into some fucked-up fish storage room rather than the empty basement office with the old floor scrubbing machine. 

He stands there in the dark for a long, cumbersome moment, manhandling the wall for a switch when the lights don’t blink on automatically. Once they do come on, it’s only one yellowish bulb over a table in the center of the room. Beyond that, there’s a strange, golden glow emanating from within a tank running against the far wall. Computer monitors give off their own faint light, but it's clear that whatever is down here doesn’t enjoy bright fluorescents. 

Night shift has been a hard adjustment but he’s doing his best to make the change. The highbrow fuckers upstairs can wait five more minutes for their polished floors, thank you very much, so he lets the door swing shut behind him with his keys in hand and walks in further, trying to get a good look at whatever’s floating in the tank in a sea of kelp.

It’s a fugly little thing, whatever it is. Kinda like a chicken egg when you shine a flashlight up to the shell, he supposes, or a jellyfish without legs that ate a whole baby dolphin. Gavin’s nearly got his nose flush up to the glass when he notices the tiny, five-fingered hand pressed against the membrane. 

So, he doesn’t exactly scream like a little bitch, but maybe it’s a close call. 

The longer Gavin stares at the embryo inside its protective caul, the more surreal it seems. But sure enough, there it fucking is: two tiny hands, a little tailfin still forming, a tiny head no bigger than a tangerine. 

“That’s a baby,” Gavin hisses under his breath, promptly steering around on his heel and breezing toward the door he came in through. There’s a camera in here watching, but he doesn’t care, snatching up a trash bag out of the receptacle by the door in a hurry if only to maintain that this was a mistake turned into an opportunity to do his goddamn job. “That’s a baby, that’s a baby, that’s a  _ fucking _ real-ass  _ baby _ .”

Back out in the basement hall again, he quickly locks the door back with his master key and then lets himself into the room next door with the floor scrubber sitting in the corner. He eases the door shut and then leans back against it, trying to catch his breath for reasons he doesn’t quite understand.

The conversation with Doctor Stern sits at the forefront of his mind, though, dropping anchor right there like it never went anywhere at all. Gavin just wonders why he’s suddenly meant to give a shit about these fish people, even if he  _ does _ talk to the young one with the big brown eyes every week when he goes out to trim bushes and clear the beach. 

Maybe there’d been a time in Gavin Reed’s life, if you look far back enough, where he’d been a product of a different system where kids get taken away from their parents. Maybe. He doesn’t like to think too much about those days anymore.

And yet, it’s all he can fucking think about while he wheels the floor scrubber upstairs at three o’clock in the morning, to polish Elijah Kamski’s office tile.   
  
  


* * *

  
Connor knows what loss feels like, now.

He doesn’t eat, he barely sleeps. He lays in their empty nest and tries not to cry, and sometimes he’s successful at that, sometimes not. He feels empty, like somebody reached inside of him and took out something he needed to live. A clock or machine without all the whirring parts, meant to serve a dutiful purpose, suddenly nothing without one small mechanism.

Hank, for his part, is quite the opposite: his dark moods return, and in the hours after the egg was stolen he was relocated to the old portion of the tank where they’re kept separated by the acrylic wall. How somebody can feel so distant in an enclosure, Connor doesn’t know. But he can’t blame Hank for being upset, or angry, at having had this happen a second time. How can you handle losing a child twice? 

Their only solace in this, if it even counts for anything at all anymore, is that they know their baby is still alive. 

Contact becomes increasingly limited. The gardener replacement even stops being allowed inside the lagoon, the ratty one named after the plant. Connor almost wishes he’d come around if only for somebody else to talk to. Loneliness, he finds, hurts a whole lot more when you have somebody nearby who is grieving on their own. 

Hank still cares for him and would die to protect Connor at this point, but things are—different. Dimmed and cloudy at the edges, and painful in a way they never were before. He wishes he could touch and hold his mate, and feel the warmth of affection in return. But they can only speak through holes in the wall and watch each other with hurt in their eyes.

And so Connor swims circles in the tank for lack of anything else to do. Around and around the man made lagoon, racking up miles upon miles in a matter of hours. Nobody asks what he’s doing. Nobody cares that he feels lost and broken inside. Not even Dr. Kamski takes real interest in the situation now that he has what he wants, as if they’re simply here to exist in a vacuum until Connor’s next heat cycle inevitably hits and takes hold.

He almost doesn’t stop when he sees Gavin Reed mopping in the viewing room one day. Almost, but then the old pull of curiosity and habit’s sake draws him over to the thick glass where the human is busy cleaning with his headphones plugged into his ears.

Gavin barely glances up when Connor approaches, though their eyes meet and hold for the barest fraction of a second. Connor drifts lazily, watching, waiting for nothing in particular. The human puts his mop down and unhurriedly gets his window cleaner and rag, and then comes over to wipe the glass. 

When he first presses the cloth to the divide between them, though, he doesn’t swipe it right away. He leans there, looking strangely preoccupied with spraying a stubborn spot on the glass, and that’s when Connor sees three words scrawled in black marker on the side of the cloth facing into the tank:  _ Dig him out. _

It jolts like a shock through Connor’s system, and before he can move Gavin is folding the towel in half and going about his business like the words never passed between them at all.    
  


  
  


Connor digs by moonlight, pawing sand away seemingly grain by grain for how quickly it moves. He digs near a large stone on the sandy bottom of the lagoon, and when he tires, Hank starts up the process on the other side. He expects they’ll be apprehended at any given moment, but the nighttime hours seem to pass without assault or sirens. It takes the better part of three hours, but then the hole is big enough for Hank to wriggle his broad body through.

When he’s back in the tank proper, and wrapping his arms around Connor again, things almost seem right in the world. But they both know they’re still far from it. 

“What’re we supposed to do now?” Hank asks, looking around for signs something is amiss. “What did the human tell you?” 

“Nothing,” Connor says, keeping Hank close as he cautiously swims around the perimeter. “But there are only two ways in and out, and it’s through the gate or through the access tunnel with the bars on it.” 

Hank stops and tugs Connor back by the hand, shaking his head. “This is another setup,” he says. “For what, I don’t fuckin’ know. But you can’t  _ trust _ these people, Con. Haven’t we learned that much already?”

“Yes,” Connor says, resolute, and pulls on Hank’s hand for them to keep going toward the access tunnel. “But what have we got to lose now, Hank?” 

Hank grits his teeth and follows.  
  


  
  
* * *   
  
  
  


Gavin’s been formulating a plan.

It may not be bombproof, but it’s definitely a plan of fuckin’ action. Getting the egg out of the incubation room even with limited resources seems like the easy part, truth be told, if he can somehow skip security long enough to get the hell out of Dodge in an inside heist George Clooney couldn’t even  _ dream _ of. The hard part, Gavin finds, is getting two full-grown merpeople out of the facility in some kind of Operation Free Willy shit. It’s not a one-man job, and this place is full of people who either don’t care or can’t be trusted.

What he really needs is a good group of crooks, but these aren’t the kind of crooks a man wants to do business with. White collars always fuck things up for everyone and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

He’s busy pondering this plan, as a matter of fact, when he drags the floor scrubber into the office labeled  _ Dr. Amanda Stern _ one night. The lights are off when he walks in, but the tank holding a pair of flashy dwarf gourami fish is lit up blue and eerie in the dark. 

Gavin nearly throws his keys across the room when the high-backed chair behind the desk swivels and Dr. Stern is staring back at him with Chloe standing behind her, both their eyes gone right to the telltale glass jar sitting on the bottom shelf of his custodial cart. 

“Mr. Reed,” Amanda says in greeting, looking him up and down before her gaze goes back to the pickle jar, still with its paper label but a large amount of saltwater and kelp stored inside. “Eager for a midnight snack?” 

“You could say that,” Gavin says, watching her and Chloe both in kind. “When the mood for a good Kosher dill strikes, it strikes.” 

“Indeed,” Amanda says, reaching into a desk drawer and pulling out three pairs of latex gloves. “Now, about that leak we spoke about.” 

Maybe he’ll have to rethink his theory on white collar criminals after all.   
  
  
  


* * *

Hank and Connor are in a kiddie pool in the back of a semi headed for the Canadian border that’ll lead them back toward the Atlantic by the time the news outlet trucks show up in front of Kamski’s research facility. 

If he thinks the media is bad, well, he’s got another thing coming when the police show up with a warrant after catching wind of maimed and murdered crew members, and the backlog of surveillance and security footage to back it up.

All good things in due time, though. For now, Gavin’s always wanted to see the coast.

Truth be told, he chalks their escape up to sheer dumb luck and the fact that a friend of a friend owed him a favor in the hauling business, but that combined with Amanda Stern’s know-how and money got them a whole lot fucking further than anybody ever anticipated. There’s still a six-hour journey before they hit saltwater, but who else in the world is going to be searching furniture store trucks for contraband fish people? Fat chance.

He rides shotgun with the driver, just in case. The contents of the pickle jar is tucked safely away with its parents in the trailer, happy as a clam despite the rough ride in some spots. Maybe Gavin got a little fuckin’ teary-eyed when he handed it back to Connor.  _ Maybe. _ But it was probably just the weird ocean smell of the fugly little thing getting to him.

He does slump back in relief and light up a cigarette when the ocean comes into view, though. They’re somewhere in New Hampshire, along the little stretch of coast that it has to its border, and it’s just after dawn. They bypass the local fishing marina and just keep driving until the big rig pulls off the road and can butt up right there to the water on the beach. 

The driver doesn’t know what, exactly, they’re carrying...and hadn’t asked. He stays in the cab while Gavin goes around to unlock the trailer and swing the doors wide, still puffing on his smoke like a chimney while he looks down the coast on either side of them in case anybody’s watching.

“Alright, you overgrown fish sticks,” he says, pulling himself up to start helping them out. “I’ve officially capped my criminal career by smuggling two dudes and a baby over state lines so they can flee into the ocean. Put me in the credits when Disney calls.” 

“Thanks for the lift, kid,” Hank says roughly, maneuvering his bulk out of the small pool before reaching back to help Connor. It all goes quite silent, then, and looking at Connor’s wide open expression of awe as he sees the ocean for the first time is a little too goddamn sentimental for Gavin to bear, so he readies himself to flee.

“Be safe out there, alright?” he says awkwardly once they’re all on the truck’s freight platform and slowly lowering down onto the rocky beach. “Take care of your kid.” 

He walks back to the cab without another word, keeping a close eye on the road. When he’s gone, Hank turns to Connor and helps him unscrew the lid on the pickle jar. 

“Here,” he says, reaching in to take out their baby, still whole and unharmed. “I’ll hold them. You—you go ahead. I’m right here.” 

Connor reaches down with his webbed fingers and touches the sand, the pebbles, like he’s never seen anything like it before. And then the cold saltwater of the Atlantic, slowly lapping up over the beach, close enough that it touches the tips of their tail fins. 

“It’s beautiful,” Connor rasps. He isn’t crying; far from it. He’s smiling when he looks at Hank through the orange light of dawn, wide and beautiful, with his dimples deepening on his cheeks and the wind blowing through those dark curls. “What do we do now?” 

“Whatever you want,” Hanks says, holding their baby close to his chest for now. “We’ve got the whole goddamn ocean to explore.”    
  
He shakes his head fondly, urging Connor to go ahead and slip into the water. He doesn’t know what happens next, exactly, but he’s looking forward to it with every ounce of life he’s got left in his body. 

When Connor folds himself back into the open embrace of the sea, Hank is right there behind him.  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Operation Free Willy Shit: COMPLETE! I told you it ended like a cheesy 90s movie; Gavin, at least, is fully aware of his participation in such a film lmfao
> 
> Thanks for reading along! If you enjoyed this story, be sure to check out some of the other mermish contributions to the zine on the @HankConMerms twitter :)


End file.
